Low-cost airline boss Bjorn Kjos will fly you to New York for £149 (and says we MUST build a new runway in Britain)

Walking through Gatwick with Bjorn Kjos is rather like accompanying a celebrity or a member of the Royal Family. Everyone, but everyone, seems to know the chief executive of low-cost airline Norwegian, and they all want a chat with him.

It’s possible Kjos, 69, does not normally travel in economy class, where I am wedged between him and his PR aide on the flight from London to Oslo.

If so, the multimillionaire puts up a good show: he doesn’t flinch at taking the Gatwick Express instead of a limo.

Sitting pretty: In the Gatwick versus Heathrow battle for a new runway, Bjorn Kjos favours the former

The 69-year old speeds through the airport, leaving me breathless (and I run marathons).

Kjos has an air of boyish surprise at finding himself running Norwegian. Perhaps this is because he is an accidental tycoon, who after earlier careers as a fighter pilot and lawyer, bought a bankrupt company and turned it into an unexpected international success.

Just in case his CV is not improbable enough, he has also written a Cold War thriller, Murmanskaffæren, or the Murmansk Affair, published in 2006, though he says he has no plans to pen a Scandi Noir TV script for BBC4.

He has also spent five years working on a book about the airline and himself –Hoyt og Lavt or ‘High and Low’.

By his account, he stumbled into his current incarnation as an airline magnate. In 1993, he was approached to draw up an investment plan to rescue a small domestic operator.

Finding new backers proved difficult, so he and his brother took a stake.

‘I put in about £200,000, which was more than I had at the time, so my wife didn’t like it at all.’

The gamble paid off: having started with a tiny fleet of Fokker 50s flying round the west coast of Norway, the company is now the third-largest low-cost airline in Europe, carrying 26m passengers a year to 130 destinations.

In the UK, Norwegian flies out of Gatwick, Manchester, Edinburgh and Birmingham and carries 4m British passengers.

Kjos says he will look at listing the shares, which are quoted on the Oslo stock exchange, on the London market. ‘If our hub is London in future we should have a listing here. UK listing would help us diversify our investors,’ he says.

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Who are the biggest shareholders? ‘Me!’ he says, laughing. ‘I have 25 per cent.’ That means his stake is worth more than £230m, though his annual pay is modest by the standards of UK chief executives at around £132,000.

He says he pays a huge rate of tax on his wealth, but that he does not want to leave Norway because his wife, Gerd Helene, a former air stewardess, wouldn’t like it.

Flying runs in the family: one of his two daughters, Anna, is a pilot for Norwegian and his father, Ola, started a small airline Norsk Skogbruskfly in 1953.

The young Bjorn, who was hooked from childhood, trained for two years as a pilot in Mississippi and Arizona then became a fighter pilot in 334 Squadron of the Norwegian Royal Air Force at the height of the Cold War, fending off Soviet intruders between 1969 and 1975.

He considered becoming a commercial pilot after leaving the service but found the planes a bit of a comedown. ‘It was as if you are used to driving a Formula One car, then suddenly you are in a road car,’ he says. Instead, he went into law.

‘I was working in a very small town as a judge so I knew all the criminals and some of them were very nice people, so I didn’t like sending them to prison,’ he says.

Kjos is incredibly charming, but not everyone has been won over. He has clashed with unions, and has fallen foul of the Scandinavian idea of ‘Janteloven’, where equality is valued above individual success.

He is now betting heavily on cheap long-haul flights, a nut no-one in the business has truly cracked. He is the first to make a concerted attempt on the transatlantic routes since Freddie Laker tried and failed in the Seventies, not that this seems to deter him.

‘Laker had to rely on the travel agencies and they were in the pockets of the airlines. It is very different now that we have the internet.’

THE MAN BJORN TO BE KING

Family: Married to Gerd Helene with three children – Lars Ola, 38, Guri Helene, 36 and Anna Helene, 33.

Favourite film: Avatar.

Favourite gadget: iPhone.

Best advice received: ‘Only have people on your team who are better than you.’

Mentor: ‘My wife,’ he says.

Career: Having served as fighter pilot during the Cold War, he took over bankrupt airline Busy Bee in 1993, turning it into Norwegian, where he has been chief executive since 2002. It launched in the UK a year later and is now the third-biggest, low-cost airline in Europe. The airline carries 4m British passengers a year from Gatwick, Manchester, Edinburgh and Birmingham.

Working day: Most days he rises at 7am, though he may be up at 5am if he is travelling, which he often is two or three times a week. He has a light breakfast of cereal then arrives at the office in Oslo around 8am and works until 5pm or 6pm. After work, he goes cross-country skiing for an hour. ‘When I ski, I think, think, think,’ he says. ‘For me it is therapy.’

Spare time: He loves golf and hunting in Scotland as well as sailing and skiing. An opera buff, he enjoys visits to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden followed by a meal at his favourite London restaurant Balthazar.

He also points to the new jet engines, which have greater capacity and are much more fuel efficient, bringing down the costs. ‘The lower oil price is another bonus.’

Are his prices really that cheap?

Yes, though you would have to book well ahead to get the best deals. Norwegian’s lowest London to New York flight is £149, including tax, and a bit less on the way back, so passengers could get a return for less than £300 but the best-priced tickets are snapped up quickly.

Alternatively, they can pay £50 extra each way for a checked bag, seat reservation and on-board meals.

Just as Freddie Laker did in his day, Kjos is facing opposition from the old guard.

He is locked in battle with the US Department of Transportation over two applications for permits, one from the UK and one from Ireland which have been stuck in the system for a two-and-a-half years.

The average wait to approve an application is 53 days. Kjos says: ‘They are being protectionist, obviously, it is the only way to put it.’

On the subject of Europe, Kjos says: ‘I don’t know where Brexit is, but I will fly there, ha, ha, ha.’ Seriously though, the Brexit camp here puts forward Norway as an example of a country that does perfectly well without being in the European Union. Why can’t we be like Norway?

‘It is an issue for the British public to decide. Norway was able to stay outside of the EU because of our oil wealth. But we have to adopt every law and regulation they make in the EU, without having any say.’

Kjos also has controversial views on female board members: he thinks Britain should copy Norway, where firms must hit a quota of 40 per cent women directors.

‘Should the UK adopt a quota system? Yes, or you will have too much old man’s thinking,’ he says.

‘There is too much of an old boys’ club. They think they are the best in the world and they are definitely not. I have no doubts about quotas because I have two daughters.’

In the Gatwick versus Heathrow battle for a new runway, unsurprisingly he favours the former. But will either ever happen, given we have been talking about it for 40 years?

‘Very good point,’ he says. ‘You need to do it to create jobs and get the tourists into London. Every new Dreamliner, it has a Rolls-Royce engine. We have recently done a $2.7bn deal with Rolls-Royce.

‘It is very sad that you are not doing it, because it is costing millions of jobs.’

He must think us terribly inefficient and short-termist, I venture.

He just smiles. ‘We will carry on doing what we do, providing low- cost fares so people can travel.’